This invention relates to conveyor systems for delivering small items, for example, to a counting or packing station and is particularly directed to the conveying of coated confections, which are fed from a conveyor belt at irregular spacings in approximately parallel rows in the direction of transport. It will be apparent, of course, that the invention may also be employed for the delivery of other types of goods.
The above described order of completed small items, with varying intervals, can occur in many processes, depending on the kind of product and on the preparatory process employed in preparing the goods. Consequently, a uniform, particularly mechanical, packing process, associated if necessary with a counting step, is not possible. This is also true in the processing of confections which have passed on a conveyor first through a coating machine and then through a cooling section while the confections may exhibit a certain regularity of order if they are placed by hand on the conveyor before coating, absolute accuracy of spacing in a row and crosswise alignment is not guaranteed even by hand placing. In particular, the lateral alignment of rows requires a very low delivery speed of the conveyor, or on the other hand, very fast and painfully accurate labor. Both of these solutions are uneconomical. Uniform spacing and cross row alignment is also not obtained in extensively mechanized processes, in which the articles are passed through various manufacturing stations and several conveyors.